Preserving the independence of the patient-physician dyad is the key not only to quality medial care, it is also the key ingredient to solving the problem of rising health care costs.
Read more here: "The Real Reason Medical Costs are Rising" (and some ideas on what to do about it.)
With apologies to vast numbers of my un-reconstructed fellow sojourners of Woodstock Nation, I’m out of the closet and into the fired up. “Ready to go” indeed. Hasn’t it ever dawned on you that our “peace” and Yasgur’s Farm demonstration of the viability of socialism were dependent on a life-support umbilical cord from the Nixon era capitalist grown-ups?Nice to know that even famous committed socialists can rethink their premises.
Didn’t you ever come to notice how the robust creation of wealth must be assured before any conversation about its redistribution can even be useful?
To those of my Woodstock cohort who are now aghast at the “tea party” (which more assuredly has “changed the world” than it’s said our misadventure at Yasgur’s farm did) I return that stunned glare, then the sputter: “But… I thought you were smart. I thought you were a nice person!” Being a nice person aligns with being in the fight for the nicest societal arrangement, among all of human history’s rarest gems: limited government.
Like, dig it, man. Some of today’s teapartyers are grown up flower children. Imagine there’s no statism. It’s easy if you try. They may say you’re a dreamer. But you’re not the only one.
“Today, this isolated relationship is no longer tenable or possible… Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient dyad must be reformulated to fit the new mold of the delivery of health care...Regulation must evolve. Regulating for improved medical care involves designing appropriate rules with authority...Health care is being rationalized through critical pathways and guidelines. The primary function of regulation in health care, especially as it affects the quality of medical care, is to constrain decentralized, individualized decision making.” (emphasis added)from New Rules, by Donald Berwick
"A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings."
-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action
"The jovial forty-three-year-old leaves us a painful but effective lesson, because although we have no elections to vote directly for those who govern us, nor courts to accept claims of police abuse, much less means by which a citizen can denounce the immigration restrictions holding the national territory in their grip, we still have our bones, our skin, our stomach walls, to reclaim, by way of the fragile terrain of our bodies, the rights they have taken from us."
"When the history of Cuba’s freedom movement is written, it’s likely that Yoani Sanchez will be recognized as a national hero and freedom fighter, the equivalent of Lech Walesa in Poland or Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic. Yoani Sanchez demonstrates that we should never underestimate the power of one courageous individual with a computer, a blog, and intermittent access to the Internet (Sanchez says she has not actually been able to see her own blog since 2007), or the individual’s power to change the world in the Information Age, especially with a message of freedom and individual liberty. Intellectual figures like Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of Yoani and her powerful message of individual freedom in one of the only remaining regimes of totalitarianism left in the world."
